Spotify Plugins for Backstage: How Commercial & Open Source Software Go Hand-in-Hand at Spotify

When most people hear about commercial software being built on top of an open source ecosystem, they immediately think SaaS. But this isn’t the only way!

At Spotify, we have hundreds of plugins providing many useful functionalities to our internal developer platform, Backstage. Since Backstage was open sourced in 2020, this plugin-based ecosystem has provided the community with a similar wealth of useful features. We’ll discuss how this extensible architecture paved the way for commercial plugins to live harmoniously within an open source ecosystem, and how Spotify-built Backstage plugins such as RBAC provides opportunities and incentives for implementations that result in positive impact on both sides.